March 28, 2024

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The Clinical Promotion Hall of Fame opens its doors to company-entire world giants – Functions – MM&M

In excess of the class of a career that saw her cofound two thriving organizations and direct a few some others, Risa Bernstein returned time and all over again to a phrase that obviously articulated her experienced philosophy: Massive thinkers imagine far better jointly.

Charlene Prounis, with whom Bernstein cofounded Accel Healthcare Communications and Flashpoint Medica, remembers the adage remaining on exhibit in Bernstein’s office in some sort or other. Tom Harrison, the company lifer who backed both of those of Bernstein’s companies below the Omnicom banner, remembers her using it as a rallying cry.

Bernstein herself claims she started out residing the philosophy in advance of she read it articulated in that way (and proceeded to set it on a poster in her office). “To me, partnership and fellowship have been always vital,” she explains. “It’s a cliché, but it normally takes a village. A stool requirements all its legs.”

Bernstein imbued that spirit of partnership and great cheer across 5 companies (and her own consultancy) in a occupation that has spanned additional than 3 a long time. She entered the promotion entire world at what she describes as “a genuine, genuine tiny purchaser agency.” A new job quickly beckoned — doing the job at a larger sized company on Seiko watches — but Bernstein rejected it immediately after enduring a two-hour training session about “how women have to behave close to Japanese adult males, which was so not for me.” She subsequently turned down a further submit in which she would have labored on Philip Morris company, a proposition she claims “was out of the issue ethically.” 

Bernstein landed in healthcare marketing in 1982, accepting an assistant account executive gig at the fabled Gross Townsend Frank Hoffman (GTFH). From the outset, she understood it was a excellent in good shape. “It was magical,” she recalls.

The four companions promptly recognized Bernstein’s strategic abilities — “Alan [Gross] always mentioned, ‘I consider Risa is extra strategic than I am,’” notes GTFH cofounder Jane Townsend — and she speedily ascended the business hierarchy. For the duration of the last 5 of her 16 yrs with the company, Bernstein served as controlling director and sat on its administration committee.

Before long, she discovered herself in Harrison’s workplace, listening to his pitch to acquire about as president of one more Omnicom business. Bernstein, alas, experienced other strategies: She and Prounis experienced by now started out bouncing all around the plan of founding an company of their personal.

“I explained to Tom, ‘I’ll entertain your offer you if you entertain mine,’” Bernstein recollects. “He claimed, ‘If you’re serious, provide me a business strategy in a 7 days.’”

Harrison, a 2020 MAHF inductee, laughs when requested about that fateful conference. “Anytime Risa came into my workplace, I realized A, we were heading to have a debate B, I was going to learn one thing and C, she was heading to have all the reasons to make me want to do what she was inquiring,” he claims.

He stresses that the idea was a no-brainer: “What she was proposing was one thing we didn’t by now have. It built a boatload of sense.” Just two months afterwards, Accel Healthcare Communications opened its doorways. “We most likely experienced that meeting in November and Risa preferred it started at the starting of the subsequent yr,” Harrison continues. “We experienced all around 20 times to figure it out, not six months, and we obtained it carried out, like the small business cards.”

Bernstein and Prounis led Accel for 6 decades, sticking all around by means of its merger with Corbett Health care Team. Shortly thereafter, they discovered themselves in Harrison’s business office once again, this time pitching the pure-engage in advert company that would come to be Flashpoint Medica. 

“Risa and I were usually considering huge,” claims Prounis, who was inducted into MAHF in 2019. “We appeared at every other and ended up like, ‘So, want to do this once again?’ There was not a good deal of back again and forth, because we understood what it would consider.”

On the other hand, suitable right after the new store opened its doors Bernstein was sidelined by a family tragedy: Her oldest son sustained a significant head injuries in a bus incident, prompting her to go away the nascent corporation for a lot more than a calendar year. 

He ultimately recovered and Bernstein took a broader lesson away from the experience. “You can say ‘no’ often. Clientele have kids, way too, and I motivate all women of all ages in this or any enterprise to feel they can do this,” she says. “It’s so good for the Hall of Fame to believe I had a great career, but my a few sons would explain to you, I hope, that they had been my precedence. I in no way missed anything that mattered.”

Because departing Flashpoint about a decade in the past, Bernstein has stayed concerned in the agency planet through short excursions at FCB Overall health (a fill-in stint as govt director) and Calcium (as EVP, director of method). She continues to be as passionate about the business enterprise now as she’s at any time been.

“I scratch my head about the paradox between the electricity and intent of our field as opposed to the weak notion,” Bernstein claims. “Despite the truth that the pharma industry is so poorly believed of and acknowledged mostly for exorbitant pricing and fomenting the opioid disaster, among other negative impressions, it is an sector that is bettering and conserving life just about every day.”

She thinks it falls on health care advertising and marketing and communications agencies to drive ahead with “the relentless pursuit of reliable, dependable, handy schooling and data that innovations the great and aids persons navigate their health conditions and some of the darkest times they may confront in their lives.” 

To that stage, Bernstein has lived some of people moments. “I’ve experienced breast cancer 2 times. I have been put on your own in a area with a video clip prior to the surgery with no assistance or no guideline the same factor occurred with the radiation. You sit there and you fully grasp why treatment dropout costs are what they are,” she carries on.

Bernstein designs to continue on to handle such challenges in the many years forward. She has no programs to retire anytime before long and is weighing board involvement and other leadership alternatives. “Some component of me needs to function in hospice just after all this most cancers working experience I have experienced far too much of,” she suggests. “I have this enthusiasm all around ‘scan-xiety,’ which is the sort of factor we can do something about.”

That overarching adore of the organization is why her imminent MAHF induction has now been cheered by colleagues and opponents alike. “I’m not likely to lie: It’s a significant second to me,” Bernstein says. “I watched all the giants whose shoulders I stood on acquire this honor. I’m just thrilled it’s my transform.”


Bernstein may well never ever have uncovered her way into medical advertising had been it not for fellow inductee Maris Schilling. As Bernstein tells it, the two of them had a widespread relationship: Schilling’s boyfriend labored with the mother of Bernstein’s boyfriend.

“She assumed I was a excellent writer and imagined Maris was a phenomenal writer, so she obtained the two of us to satisfy. Right away, I was like, ‘Wow, this is a individual I want to be all over.’ She was these a strong drive — amusing as hell, thoroughly in your experience.”

Bernstein did not want to produce, so Schilling — presently ensconced at GTFH — connected her with company leaders and namesakes Jane Townsend and Alan Gross. “To this working day, I thank Maris for my entry into this planet,” Bernstein clarifies. “She was the individual who taught me anything I tried to educate each solitary person who will come into this organization: You really do not have to know science perfectly to realize success, you just have to not fear it.”

Schilling took a rather strange route into the business. Even though working as a secretary at Klemtner Marketing, she listened to rumblings that a crucial client was not shopping for what the company was advertising. Off-handedly, she proposed an thought that not only bridged the divide, but developed into an award-successful marketing campaign that ran for a few decades.

From that position onward, the clerical function was managed by any individual else. Following stints on the duplicate teams at William Douglas McAdams and Lavey Wolff Swift, GTFH hired her as VP, team copy supervisor. Although she stayed for only a few many years, it was listed here that Schilling’s star ascended.

“She experienced an very swift intellect,” says Townsend, a founding partner of GTFH and a 2011 MAHF inductee. “As a author, she did not just arrive up with a intelligent line mainly because she could. She did her homework and dug into points deeply. She would have been a fantastic and thriving writer in any field she chose.”

By way of case in point, Townsend factors to a marketing campaign GTFH designed for Squibb’s hydrocortisone in the early 1980s. The central notion was that, if a person’s pores and skin could discuss for by itself, it would check with for hydrocortisone.

“Maris and I ended up in California and driving from a single position to another, and she just started out chatting out the duplicate on the place: ‘Hi, I’m your pores and skin. When I itch, I scratch,’” Townsend remembers. “It was a excellent radio industrial and then we turned it into a Tv professional.”

The Tv execution faced some pushback. Networks wouldn’t air the industrial because the actor dressed up as the skin — Townsend’s cousin, as it turns out — experienced a flesh-colored costume deemed too risqué for the period. Nonetheless, the radio ad won a Clio at a time when pharma and health advertisements almost never acquired these kinds of thing to consider.

Just after departing GTFH, Schilling worked in direct innovative roles at Kallir Phillips Ross. She still left the company briefly to elevate a family and later to battle ovarian cancer. Pursuing procedure, she returned to the small business as SVP, inventive director at LifeBrands and then as a cofounder of Reagent.

Over the yrs, Schilling worked on any amount of superior-profile courses. She led the innovative and strategy group that helped Tylenol manage sector management in the wake of a second poisoning incident and oversaw the evolution of Merck’s Emend from undeveloped molecule with no clear indicator to industry-topping therapy for chemo-connected nausea and vomiting.

As a author, Schilling served craft the Client Monthly bill of Rights — which is however displayed in hospitals to this working day — and a pores and skin treatment handbook for nurses of sufferers acquiring EgFR inhibitors. Later on in her profession, Schilling wrote a participate in (Most cancers, The Musical) and a reserve (Medication Avenue) about her lifetime and function experiences, respectively.

“In every little thing she did, there was never just a person plan,” Townsend explains. “She’d do a little something and then she’d appear in and say, ‘OK, here’s yet another 1.’ Two days later on, ‘I think this is even much better.’ She would continue to keep noodling right until she acquired it fantastic in her intellect.”

Nevertheless, Schilling’s qualified legacy is as much about the way she handled her friends as it is about the do the job they teamed to produce. Bernstein highlights her sense of humor (“she was sharp”), while Townsend admiringly phone calls her “a pusher … but she did it in these a good way. She would make some others want to be superior.”

Schilling was also first rate and progressive-minded at a time when the business was noticeably considerably less so. At KPR, she employed the agency’s 1st Black copywriter and, amid internal pushback, mounted her on a higher-profile piece of Johnson & Johnson company.

“She was principled and intelligent, and she pushed for suitable and superior,” Townsend suggests. “I wish she were being listed here to instruct it to absolutely everyone else.”

Schilling died of lung cancer on November 17, 2020. She had uncovered about her imminent MAHF induction a several weeks prior.


Some 35 years back, Ron Souza shared some of his thoughts about the long run of pharmaceutical marketing and advertising with his colleagues. “For us in advertising and marketing, the difficulties and opportunities have never ever been bigger, with adjust all all-around,” he wrote. “Relationships with clients, and what they call for of us, are altering. Channels and solutions of distribution are modifying — in an evolving media entire world that is much more elaborate, speedier and restless with innovation.”

Over the program of a just about 4-10 years career in and all-around health care, that wasn’t the only time Souza proved prescient. Right after graduating from Northeastern University’s College or university of Pharmacy, he commenced his occupation in the medical center realm. But as he ascended to a director posture at Newington’s Children’s Healthcare facility in Newington, Connecticut, Souza started to issue what arrived upcoming.

“I received some great management experience, but there was nowhere to go with it,” he recollects. “I was looking for a more substantial observe to run on, I guess.”

That administration experience ultimately served Souza nicely. He produced his way to Revlon, where by he oversaw what he calls “a fantastic melting pot of imaginative folks. We didn’t have a entire good deal to provide, but we marketed the hell out of it.” Pursuing a shorter prevent at Endo Prescription drugs, where by he worked on the staff that introduced opioid overdose therapy Narcan, Souza entered the agency world.

He thrived amid its strength and spirit of camaraderie. Arriving at the venerable Rolf Werner Rosenthal in 1974, Souza swiftly produced a identify for himself as the two a plugged-in supervisor and a new-business magnet. Products and models he touched through his RWR tenure included Sudafed, Actifed, AZT (the to start with-in-course HIV remedy) and Marion’s calcium channel blocker Cardizem.

Souza remembers the latter as between his finest achievements. 

“The only edge it experienced around the opposition was a slight edge in facet outcomes, so soon after a few of periods we arrived up with the yellow really hard hat that claimed ‘Safety Very first.’ We imagined physicians would see really hard hats anywhere they drove, due to the fact it was a time when cities have been rising and properties were heading up all over the place,” he describes. “We went in for the presentation and we all wore really hard hats. A few days afterwards — ‘OK, you won.’ It was 1 of the most enjoyment items I worked on.” The campaign established an enduring manufacturer affiliation and gained several awards.

Over the training course of his time at RWR and Ogilvy & Mather (which snapped up RWR in 1984), Souza earned a standing as 1 of the agency world’s excellent guys. Even nevertheless folks who entered the business enterprise below him have thrived, shifting on to observed and guide firms this sort of as Harrison Star Wiener & Beitler, Sandler Communications and Botto Roessner Horne & Messenger, Souza downplays his part as a mentor.

“Being in a position as great as RWR, I was capable to apply the management encounter I had in the previous and it all kind of labored out,” he suggests. “We ended up normally proud when our people said, ‘Wow, this is the nicest put I have come to in the sector.’”

Long-retired and a good-grandfather of three, Souza couldn’t be happier or extra gracious about receiving the hall’s call. “Recognition is a wonderful issue,” he adds. “Getting the award will be thrilling, but studying what the individuals who nominated me had to say about me — it is just great to know that people today highly regarded what I did.”

The 2021 Awards Dinner is tentatively scheduled for July 29th at The Pierre lodge in New York City. Dinner tickets can be purchased at www.mahf.com/gala